The technical team of wireless local area network standards (802.11) of the American Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), proposes that M2M services should be supported in a wireless fidelity (WiFi) network. In addition, a project is initiated to build an 802.11ah technical work team for M2M services.
As IEEE 802.11ah extends WiFi hotspot coverage from 100 meters to 1-2 kilometers, the application of the WiFi network will be increasingly popular. Carriers, such as China Telecom, China Mobile, and China Unicom, all will deploy their own WiFi networks. To achieve meter reading automation, M2M users, such as electric power companies, gas companies, and water supply companies, also will deploy their own WiFi networks and construct their own intelligent measurement systems for achieving the meter reading automation of the three kinds of meters. Environmental protection organizations, forest management departments, earthquake monitoring organizations, and the like also will deploy their own private WiFi networks to monitor and forecast environmental pollution, forest fires, earthquake disasters, and the like. In addition, public places, such as airports, stations, hotels, coffee houses, and the like also will deploy their own WiFi networks to issue information and for the convenience of subscribers to surf the Internet.
In sum, with the large-scale popularization of WiFi application, the low-cost advantage of a WiFi network will be increasingly obvious. In the same geographic region, it is possible that different carriers, industrial organizations, service departments, and the like simultaneously deploy WiFi networks. Therefore, the wide coverage of WiFi networks promotes the development of M2M services.
However, in another aspect, the wide coverage of WiFi networks also imposes higher requirements on achieving M2M services, for example, reducing power consumption of an M2M terminal, reducing signaling overhead of a system, and improving efficiency of executing an M2M service by a system.
Therefore, how to effectively achieve an M2M service in a WiFi network is a technical problem needing to be solved.